Drought continues to tighten its grip on the state. When accessing how bad this year has been, it is often interesting to compare against recent benchmark drought years that some folks may recall. The featured chart attempts to do this by presenting a heatmap of the year with the lowest precipitation total for a period between the given date and yesterday for some selected sites in Iowa. Note that the sites are labelled with the most recent drought monitor classification. Areas in green indicate that for the given date to 18 Sept period, 2023 is the driest on record for the given site. Of course, when you compute this over just a few days and it did not rain over those days, 2023 will show up on this map, hence the green slivers on the left hand side. That aside, some of the hardest hit areas this year show up with some green areas dating back to early summer, including Waterloo and Cedar Rapids. The good news is that there are considerable chances of precipitation in the forecast, including some good rains that have fallen overnight.

Voting:
Good = 16
Bad = 1
Abstain = 2